Posts Tagged ‘TED’

Jaime Lerner reinvented urban space in his native Curitiba, Brazil. Along the way, he changed the way city planners worldwide see what’s possible in the metropolitan landscape. From building opera houses with wire to mapping the connection between the automobile and your mother-in-law, Jaime Lerner delights in discovering eccentric solutions to vexing urban problems. In [...]

Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t [...]

Diana Lind poses a challenge: let’s re-imagine the future of urban transportation and tear-down highways that cut through our cities. Lind’s talk discusses how forward-thinking cities have dismantled highway infrastructure — building vibrant public spaces in the face of car culture. In the case of the aging Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, Lind asks planners to [...]

Jennifer Pahlka believes that the value of a city reaches far beyond its borders. The increase in open dialogue between local government and citizens has a positive global impact on everything from environmental awareness and economic equality (the Occupy movement) to open data and citizen access to technology. Cities have not only become better for [...]

Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities — that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city’s population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for [...]